The Waiting City – Australian Movies That Work – Claire McCarthy

Sydney based writer, director, producer and visual artist, Claire McCarthy has written, directed and produced a number of documentaries, short films and music videos in Australia, India, Germany and Mexico.Following a special presentation and honours at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, The Waiting City came to Sydney in 2010. On the eve of the film’s Australian premier, and to discuss the art of movie making – in Australia and India – Claire McCarthy addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 29 June 2010.

THE WAITING CITY – AUSTRALIAN MOVIES THAT WORK

CLAIRE McCARTHY

When I began developing the idea for my film The Waiting City, I knew I wanted to make a love story. A good love story. I had no particular personal reason for doing this at the time because I had no boyfriend to speak of and was very much destined, so I thought, to the sad fate of a cat lady spinster.

I wanted to make a love story because exposure to love with all its unlikely facets was the most compelling and transforming aspect of my time spent in the contradictory and inspiring Indian city of Kolkata.

And looking back with the wisdom of retrospect, perhaps I was curious to find an access point into this thing called love because I wanted to know what this really meant to me as an unattached, out of work, aspiring film director.

To make sense of myself and the world.

But I am jumping too far forward in time.

To tell you of my experiences in India and my aspirational relationship to love, I have firstly tell you about how I came to be in city of Kolkata and why this was so very significant to me both personally and to my evolution as a filmmaker.

About five years ago now, my youngest sister Helena was struggling with her final year at high school, a year punctuated by much wailing and gnashing of teeth at my parents home, which thankfully at the time I was not a resident.

Needless to say my mother and my sister were experiencing a kind of war of attrition whereby the thankless and brutal task of mothering was variously met by thinly veiled sarcasm, resentment and abuse.

My mother would lament:

I cook for you, I clean for you and yet you’re such a rude, ungrateful brat. You would never survive a day outside this comfort bubble of home and everything I do for you. You would never survive a day in the slums of Calcutta.

To which my sister would retort, something to the tune of (and I’m barely paraphrasing);

That’s pathetic mother, Kolkata would be a total party compared to the tyranny of living under this regime of mind control and constant nagging. You really have no concept of how hard I’m trying to study. Can’t you see I’ve been wearing the same track-pants, food stained jumper and ugg boots at least 37 days straight. I’ve become a total dork and haven’t even blow dried my hair once because I’m too busy slaving to achieve some kind of reasonable result in the Higher School Certificate to save myself from humiliation in front of all my friends and the entire world.

At this juncture I must interrupt my story here with a brief moment of reflection.

The telling and retelling of a story is a slippery slope of fact and fiction. How does one ever tell a story in a way that is entirely accurate, or dare I say, true? How does someone realistically wear ugg boots for 37 days straight and also attend secondary education at distinguished MLC College?

Does the potential of this visual provide some small possibility for a smile? Maybe even a chuckle? Is it that in the retelling of a story we can’t help but embellish details, pluck at the listeners heart strings, make that fish twice the size than the one we actually caught, add in a banana peel for a bit of comic relief.

And in the retelling each person finds certain aspects of the “truth” more interesting than another person.

Experiments have shown that if you gave the same script to three different directors you would find yourself with three entirely different movies. You cannot help as a person, let alone as a filmmaker, tell a story framed by your own perception, conditioning, proximity to the subject.

So what is that foggy line between fact and fiction in the telling of a story? What do we care most about as an audience? Will a story be more true because all the facts are diligently conveyed, or in doing this do we become bored and would prefer the story to cut to the chase and just get on with things?

Due to the skill in how certain information is revealed or withheld from the viewer over the course of the narrative journey, causes the implication of facts to become less important than emotion. What becomes crucial then is the overall feeling or emotional response the viewer has to the essence of what the story is actually about.

The success of fiction is judged against the rules of the non-fiction world. If elements of the true story are stranger than the rules of the fiction world, the story may appear inauthentic or unbelievable and won’t work because the audience won’t believe the story to be true.

The rules of fiction are different to the rules reality. They are close to each other, yet also very far apart. The delight of the narrative exchange is to allow the viewer to suspend their disbelief, their connection to the real world and enter a kind of parallel universe that is actually fabricated.

However, due to the manner of the stories retelling and its fidelity to what is important to us in reality, allows us the opportunity to discover more about the truth of reality itself.

Picasso said, famously: “Art is the lie that makes us realise the truth”. So the audience, eager to suspend disbelief, will if taken properly through the mine field of story telling fiction, will travel through to the other side hopefully with a greater sense of “truth” in relationship to themselves and their own reality.

John Steinbeck had this to say about the foggy line of truth:

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

So truth, in essence, is absolute but in its retelling can be impressionistic, reimagined, delightful and relative. Certainly the retelling is unique to the point of view of the storyteller herself.

So, in relation to the struggles of my sister and my mother all those many moons ago, of course I’m exaggerating this story in the retelling for dramatic effect and do hope that it is understood that both my poor sister and mother are continually vilified in my attempts to dramatise the stakes of this situation.

Beware. Everyone is fodder for a good yarn. Even your own family.

Needless to say the war culminated with my sister finally pronouncing that she could in fact survive a day in the slums of Kolkata and promptly decided to book tickets to spend three months ensconced in the work of Mother Teresa’s nuns as soon as she completed her final exam. There was no backing out for my baby sister now. She had run the gauntlet. Risen to the challenge.

She was determined to prove she was made of tougher stuff than my mother had ever thought possible. Meanwhile. Cut to me.

Alone in the kitchen of the ratty, share house in which I dwelled on the wrong side of almost trendy Newtown, I stared into the jowls of unemployment and creative flux, whilst trying to work out how the hell I was going to string out my last $9 to cover meals for the next week and not hassle my parents for mercy donations.

Sadly at this juncture, my plans for cinematic world domination seemed like a dim pipe dream. I had even considered perhaps returning to the seeming safe-haven of academia; perhaps a PhD should be the next qualification on my list? This would certainly be the path of least resistance in order to avoid succumbing to the drudgery of a “real” job that had no guarantee of reflecting my area of expertise.

I’d had a few “real” jobs; working in retail, working in bars, writing articles, teaching overseas students, selling overprices jewels, interviewing war veterans, being a tour guide, making prop weapons in the art department of the Hollywood film The Matrix, removing labels off beer bottles, singing at people’s weddings, painting peoples houses. I had even sold a few of my own paintings.

But what was my real passion? And not just passion. My area of expertise? Lately I had begun to forget what it was I was actually qualified to do as a film director. I reminded myself as a form of comfort.

Firstly I recognised the need to tell a particular story, then found my unique relationship and connection to that story. Then I would I write a script, sometimes by myself, sometimes in collaboration with a writer. This would be in narrative screenplay form that reflected the psychological and subtextural components of that story.

Then I would assemble, together with a producer, our creative team; actors to embody the characters of the story on screen, a cinematographer and production designer to work with me to create the visual style, tone and feel of the film, a composer to discover the emotional undercurrent, how that unconscious thread of music would run as counterpoint to what we saw literally on screen.

And of course the tireless genius of the sound recordist, the adaptability and ingenuity of the hair and makeup department and all the rest of the many indispensable creatives who come together to take the germ of an idea into motion picture poetry on the silver screen. And of course we would have a healthy budget so that my “vision” for the project would be realised without compromise.

But where, oh where, was this life I so yearned for as an aspiring film director?

After six years of straight study of Design, Communications and then being one of the youngest graduates from the coveted Screen Directing stream at the acclaimed Australian Film, TV and Radio School, I foolishly still thought the world was going to be my oyster. Surely everything would be easy at some point? Soon I would be able to feel again that unparalleled sense of exhilaration, pressure and creative excitement of working together on a film shoot with other creative people of like mind, on a common goal.

In the tradition of the greats that had blazed such a bright precedent for the Australian Film Industry and had also studied at the film school two generations before me; Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Philip Noyce; I thought that I too would somehow magically fall into feature film directing, be chosen from the hundreds of people in the world who also felt that they too should be film directors.

Surely, I had a right? Didn’t I? I deserved to be big screen storyteller. I’d studied hard. Made many short films and documentaries. Spent every cent I had earned on my films and borrowed and begged my way through others. Travelled around the world to film festivals. Even won some awards.

Surely someone would inevitably take pity on me, recognise my talent, read my scripts, ply me with grant money, or even better, I would stumble upon a benevolent benefactor, a modern day Medici who would finance my cinematic dreams and together we would transform the heartbeat of the world.

The phone rang and wrenched me back into reality. It was my sister. She was weeping down the phone. That kind of snuffling, inconsolable crying. In between sobs, I deciphered that she was asking if I wanted to go with her to work in the slums of Kolkata.

Wow. Three months, I thought. That’s a long time. And besides, what on earth would I want to go to Kolkata for? This is the same city that has often been referred to as “the black hole”, the overpopulated former capital of British India, a city made infamous due to the incalculable disparity between rich and poor redeemed somewhat by the tireless work of one ballsy 4ft high Albanian nun by the name of Mother Teresa? And what on earth was I going to gain by going on this trip besides baby-sitting my sister and becoming some kind of proxy mother figure, which would be just be weird and possibly quite annoying?

Three months was a long time! Any number of things could happen in my career, which was, could be, poised for anything. I could be discovered, I could try and motivate myself to finish one of my scripts. Hollywood could even come knocking.

Looking back at this moment I realise how much our lives are fashioned from a necklace of choices; where life presents a cross roads, and how completely important that particular choice can precipitate the direction of the rest of your life. I realise now how much this bold invitation from my sister, which was as much an act of contrition as blind defiance from her part, was quite simply a lifeline for me. Without being wrenched from the depths of my wallowing, ego drenched self-pity; I might still be sitting in that grimy kitchen in Newtown feeling sorry for myself.

Besides. India was meant to be cheap. Rightio. I said. When do we go?

The wonderful Southern American writer Flannery O’Connor once said : “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.” Her fierce, tongue-in-cheek comment refers to the value of artists tackling their creative mission head on, facing their fear, confronting it, in order to ignite and clarify their own purpose and vision as much as to convey meaning and message to us the audience, the viewers, the witnesses.

No artist is ever going to achieve great work whilst wallowing in their own self pity. An artist needs to know what they fear, within themselves and within the world. And if they don’t, they need to find it. Not in a kind of hippy, flaky kind of way. But it is through the things that activate us, really motivate us, that throw us out of kilter, set us onto a different path; these things can liberate, change and burnish us into better, more effective people.

The more we avoid the things that are already burning inside of us, that have often been burning for ages, things we know we have to do, we have to understand, we have to give to others, we have to sacrifice for the greater good, we have to say/experience/do, the more it will come at us, hunt us down, become bigger, more oppressive, more resentful, more depressing, more negative.

Until there comes a day when that voice inside becomes so quite that we may not be able to hear it anymore. And what it was that inspired us or made us feel truly connected, motivated, engaged and alive in the first place, is silent. And then, something in us dies.

This is not to say that this choice to go to Kolkata seemed in the foggiest bit life shattering at the time. Of course I thought is life was fine thanks very much. Until right about the time when the smeared glass doors of Kolkata airport opened and my sister and I stepped out into the foggy heat of our first Kolkata night. From that moment, life took on a completely different rhythm to that of anything I had ever experienced.

Flannery O’Connor goes on to say: “At it’s best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst an age that has domesticated fear and learned to live with it happily”.

It is so easy to become complacent. To be bored. Half engaged. And not even realise it! Some people just need to buy a nice new pair of shoes. I needed a trip to Kolkata. Living and working in Kolkata with my sister is a whole other story of which I don’t have time to properly cover this evening. Needless to say we finished our three month stint and then returned one year later for another three months.

So I will give you the 20 words or less.

The experience working side by side with those brave and joyous nuns who tirelessly continue Mother Teresa’s legacy, was in equal parts shocking, hopeful, dreadful, hilarious and entirely captivating. Not only did I fall in love with these nuns, these warriors of love, but I also fell deeply in love with this rich, eclectic, history and completely contradictory city of Kolkata. And, significantly, I also formed a bond with my youngest sister that will remain rock solid for the rest of our lives.

Needless to say at the time my filmmaker brain was in sensory overload. In tandem with the work we were doing, I started to make a documentary film about my sister’s experiences of connection and cultural meltdown in Kolkata and by proxy, mine also.

As our trip progressed we began to meet and make friends with a number of couples from around the world trying to adopt children within many of the orphanages in which we were working. I started to become intrigued by Western couples adopting children and what that actually meant in terms of infertility, different expressions of what motherhood and fatherhood and family actually meant.

Also, I became interested in what it meant to choose, to be in a position to choose at all, to delay choices and then sometimes be deprived of choice and to have no control over your life at all. So, being a nosy filmmaker, I became very fascinated by the love stories of these people and very curious about what motivated them to make this very difficult and complex choice to adopt a child.

Although every adoption story I have heard is unique of course, I realised that one of the things that was consistent about the adoption process was the protracted waiting period in which to receive a child. Some couples had been waiting three years before being able to meet their child for the very first time. Some of them longer.

The possibilities from a filmmakers perspective interested me. What might happen to people whilst they’re waiting and are rendered powerless by the situation?

I started to consider that in waiting for a child a couple would inevitably be pulled in so many different directions and vulnerabilities would be exposed within the relationship. I also realised that even though adoption, which has a kind of zeitgeisty appeal particularly amongst the Hollywood elite, was also a very loaded, complex and timely subject matter.

I started to think about how I could touch on all these complex issues but still try and make a movie that would be relevant to people who had never been to India, maybe never stepped into an orphanage or even thought about adopting a child. How could I make the movie accessible to them and entice them to go to the cinema?

The big question to myself was, how can I try to tell a story about a couple but not let this sink too much into some kind of statement about adoption itself? Or become a story only about the disparity between rich and poor, or the ravages of Colonialism, Imperialist attitudes and in its final analysis a kind of negative, whiney story?

Or conversely, at the other end of the spectrum, how I could avoid the pitfall of the story becoming steeped too much in the wax lyrical projection and “whimsy” of the exotic East; where people are transported temporarily from the stasis of their lives by their fleeting encounter with the exotic other only to have some minor naval gazing experience without much genuine effect on the state of their actual life?

The balance here had to be handled very carefully. John Lennon said of his attitude to art:

My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

These are prophetic words about not only the importance of art to be a vehicle of collective expression, but also for art to be accessible to us the audience, to be in effect about us, for us, and therefore, strangely more watchable and therefore potentially more commercially viable.

People want to feel. People want to be transported and entertained. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously because life itself is hard enough. We want to have permission to feel things that we all feel but may not want to admit.

Even if the situations presented on screen is not entirely identical to the circumstances of our own lives, feelings are much more precise in their abstraction as they can be applied to many situations without being specific. We want to feel because we want to know we are not alone in the confusion of the human experience. That there is room for wonder and laughter and yes, tears.

But people don’t want to be made to feel stupid, condescended or worse, bored. So I wondered both then and even more so as I returned to Australia and started to tinker with script ideas for the movie, what story did I want to tell about these couples trying to adopt children? How could I bring to life what I felt about my experiences and my observations of this very unique and complex world of humanitarian aid? And if the story is about the emotional stranglehold and the vulnerability of relationships between two people, this was in fact, a love story.

And so the process started of placing one foot after another, sifting through possibilities and outcomes, of the twists and turns in logic and emotion and the capabilities for human behaviour that could be explored within this story.

And my main question then became how could I tell this love story first and foremost in a way that was going to be interesting and engaging and give people an opportunity to feel something that might be relevant to their own lives? Even if they had not experienced this themselves?

So what I began to develop was an adventure story, a road movie of sorts and of course, a love story about a young couples journey to Kolkata to collect their adopted child. Intercountry adoption then became a microscope in to expose the inevitable vulnerabilities that can occur when people are wrenched out of their ordinary lives and forced to face the things that maybe lurking under the surface.

So this also became personal to me.

The dramatic possibilities started to present themselves further: what happens to people while they’re waiting for the thing they really want, particularly when they’re rendered powerless by choices they’ve made earlier in their life, or when they think they can control their lives but are put into a waiting pattern, a holding pattern and just have to wait seemingly powerless for the thing they want the most? What happens when they just have to surrender to aspects that are out of their control?

Significantly, I chose Kolkata as the context and in some ways an antagonist in this story.

Recognising that adoption is a world issue, it’s not a local issue also became an important dimension. Africa, China, Korea – people are adopting children from these countries too, but this is where an artist has to feel connected in order to find an access point into what they are trying to say with their story.

It felt natural to me to set the story in Kolkata because I know and love this city so well, having returned to the city over 12 times since that first visit, finishing the documentary film about my sister and the work we were doing Mother Teresa’s nuns. So the idea really started to gain momentum and interest for me because it became an exploration of a marriage and of the demands and expectations of a relationship. And of love.

Once I had decided these things and without being trite, a snowball started in my life. I met the beautiful man who was to become one of my key collaborators in the film and later my husband, Denson Baker ACS who is the cinematographer on the film. I joined forces with long term friend and accomplished producer Jamie Hilton and we started to seriously think about how the hell we were going to shoot a movie in India.

Boy did we have to to do our homework!

The process from script to screen on The Waiting City has been about four years. Initially I made the documentary about my younger sister and I volunteering in the slums in Kolkata and in tandem began to research and observe this particular and unique world of humanitarian aid and adoption. The documentary has undeniably became a jumping off point for research and development of the fiction screenplay of The Waiting City and gave me insight into the people behind adoption as well as the people and city of Kolkata.

The birth of this film is therefore personal, researched, observed and imagined. I have gleaned so much inspiration from so many very remarkable and inspiring people who have allowed me to interview them and have shared their stories with me. Together with Jamie Hilton and Denson Baker we embarked on a journey together to figure out how we were going to make this film a reality. We made a number of research trips to India, met with many very senior Indian film creatives and began to handpick our team very carefully.

We also made a music video in Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges in 47 degree heat as a litmus test for some of the major set pieces of the movie, as much to experiment with working with crew an all-Indian crew as to assess how many people and resources we’d need to bring from Australia.

We worked in a way that that was almost documentary real – using limited lighting, a skeletal crew and shooting in real locations not in studios or in sets. This became a similar approach to how we made The Waiting City. We didn’t want approach the making of the film like we were foreigners, just coming in and taking over a city and doing things our way.

I wanted the film to have a certain ‘poetic naturalism’ to the style and tone, whereby the film would real in an almost documentary way at but there was also a visual and narrative authority to the films style, tone and approach to performance.

And The Waiting City is very much a performance driven film. We our next greatest challenge was to try and work out how to find our cast. At the end of a long days shoot for our music video in Varanasi, one of our Indian crew asked me who would be my dream actress to be the leading lady of the film.

I told him how much I loved Radha Mitchell, how she had a strong connection to India from her childhood, how I wanted an actress who understood India from the inside in a way that only having travel to India could afford you. I felt Radha could bring this kind of depth and complexity to the role and had never seen her play a character like this.

But, truthfully, it was kind of wishful thinking about Radha Mitchell in this movie. She was enjoying the successes of Hollywood, having left Australia over 15 years ago and had starred in countless Hollywood blockbusters including Man on Fire, Woody Allen’s Melinda & Melinda, Pitch Black, Phone Booth. She was Johnnie Depp’s wife in Finding Neverland. There was little or no chance of attaching an actress like this to our tiny project.

Needless to say, one of our crew promptly went to the Times and India and divulged the entire synopsis of the movie to them and that Radha Mitchell was pegged to play the lead. Meanwhile Radha found the article on the internet and rang her agent wondering what was this Australian film shooting in India and this Australian director that claimed to have cast her as the lead actress in the movie. Needless to say her agent had the only copy of the script in circulation on her desk. She sent it to Radha, who read it, loved it and as they say the rest is history.

Joel Edgerton who plays her husband in the film was a little bit more difficult to cast. The character of Ben that Joel plays in the film had to be likeable, even though his character is in many ways the lesser part of the relationship at the start of the story. So I needed to find an actor who we could like from the very beginning, even in spite of his inherent failings.

This was important for both characters – that we could see them both as being people we could relate to and want to go on a journey with. That we wouldn’t think, ugh, these guys are just people that we’re not interested in watching, because they’re just whining all the time, or that the way that they see life and the way they react to things is ugly. We had to invest emotionally in the characters and want to see them stay together.

The other thing with Joel is that he’s so funny, he’s so likeable, and he has such dynamism about him and such versatility as an actor. He’s always inventive, and he approaches storytelling from a very clever, very insightful viewpoint and he never does anything “literally”. And he can sing!

It has absolutely been a highlight of my career so far working with such great actors on this film. The cast for the film are a very eclectic mix of some very wonderful professional actors at the peak of their powers; Radha Mitchell, Joel Edgerton as mentioned but also Samrat Chakrobarty who won an acting award when we premiered the film at the Toronto Film Festival last year, as well as the ethereal Isabel Lucas and the luminous Tillotama Shome.

The film also showcases some very talented emerging actors as well as a significant contingent of “non actors” that is, real people playing themselves.

It was really important to me that the performances across the board were as authentic as possible and captured a cross section of Kolkata’s diverse character and culture but also provided an honest rhythm to the film and an authentic context to assist the lead cast.

It is a great testament to flexibility and skill of the actors that they were willing to indulge my theories about the fine line between fact and fiction as there were many times this line was blurred in the filmmaking process. Through my many trips to India I had a great number of friends and local contacts from around the Suddah Street district and slum areas whom I approached to play key roles in the film.

Often I would spot interesting looking people on the street and we would quite simply ask them if they wanted to be in the movie. I also had a passionate and committed local team who really went out of their way to access the most appropriate people, who were not always the most convenient or easy to mobilise.

I really enjoyed combining real actors and non actors who have first hand “lived” experience of whatever scenario they were participating in because it basically reflected their own way of life.

This almost “verite” or documentary approach applied to virtually all the scenes in the film and the professional actors were certainly kept them on their toes! They often wouldn’t know what reaction to expect or what elements they may have to insinuate into the given circumstances. This kept things very fresh and spontaneous and I hope really captures an honest viewpoint of the people and city of Kolkata.

So, somehow, in the madness of making the film we managed to work out a balance between bringing people from home, bringing resources from home, and embracing the existing resources, personnel and creative infrastucture that we could marshall in India. We had up to 120 people on our crew and five languages spoken on set.

One thing that I underestimated early on in the process of researching and putting together our team was the realisation that the Indian film industry is full of very senior creatives and technicians. To put this in perspective the Indian film Industry made over 2000 Bollywood, regional and foreign films. Australia made 40. So we were in very good hands in India.

In the making of the movie, I’ve had the unparalleled opportunity to work with a team of the most gifted, amazing artists from such eclectic backgrounds and talent is something that I could have never imagined possible. We are the first Australian film ever to have film entirely on location in India. This is no small achievement and it was crucial to me that the team became like a family in the making of The Waiting City. We wanted the film to be a collaborative process with a blending of ideas and resources.

The film is a very fine example of high level planning, collaboration and cultural exchange between incredible Australian and Indian creatives and technicians. But even though I was so far away at the time, in the midst of our journey in India, I was also aware that the Australian film industry was still taking some serious body blows in terms of being able to attract Australians to see our own movies.

Indeed between 2004-2008 the Australian film industry was experiencing a chilling slump in box office sales. Why was this? Was it burgeoning technologies like video games and other forms of entertainment rendering people disinterested in going to the cinema? Was it the growing trend of digital downloading and bootlegging, people effectively stealing films off the internet or (in the better scenario) legitimately purchasing and downloading films to watch on in the privacy of their own living rooms? Was it that people couldn’t afford cinema tickets, let alone the popcorn and the choc tops? Were films being let down by distributors and exhibitors in the management, acquisition and advertising of films?

But Australians were still going to the movies. They were just not interested in seeing Australian movies. But how could this be? How could Australians not be interested in going to see our own movies?

Historically Australia could be described as “boom and bust” due to the instability and cyclical nature of the industry. The 1970s and 1980s are regarded by many as the ‘golden age’ of Australian cinema, with government funding increased and with soft money support we were able to produce and fund internationally competitive films after again a long slump in overseas traction.

Who can forget the apocalyptic thriller Mad Max, the romantic comedy Crocodile Dundee, the chilling whimsy of Picnic at Hanging Rock or the poignant insight of Breaker Morant? Australians used to have a healthy sense of national pride in our own product. Indeed, we have made films that have captured the hearts and minds of people around the globe. What about Muriel’s Wedding? Priscilla Queen of the Desert? Strictly Ballroom? Babe?

And although we had some recent hits like Little Feet and Moulin Rouge, our successes seemed to be few and far between. Was it that Australian films could not compete with our big brother Hollywood? There was no way we could consistently afford those kind of budgets to make “event films”, those spectacular, special effects driven extravaganzas that Americans flaunted in our faces.

And Americans were so good at genre movies too. They knew how to make stars, to film stars, to create dreams on screen, indelible big screen moments that would transport us, turn our hearts a-flutter, take us into history, into war itself, into outer space. And what about our world class creatives and actors?

So many of our actors are internationally recognized stars, not just in Australia but in living rooms in Paris, remote islands in Greece, in small towns in China or the bible belt in the deep South of America. We are known everywhere. People may not have known we were Australian, but they knew talent when they saw it. From Errol Flynn to Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, to Mel Gibson, Nicole Kidman to the late great Heath Ledger. Our talent was palpable.

Our Australian creatives won academy awards for their cinematography, costumes, design. We produced thoroughbreds. Renowned for being a hard working, resilient, creative, insightful roll your sleeves up kind of a mob. Louis Nowra, the esteemed Australian writer of both stage and screen, recently wrote a scathing retrospective of the Australian Film Industry and the film

line up of 2008-9.

Remarking on Australian films lack of appeal to Australian audiences over the last seven years he wrote:

It is going to be a long and arduous process to convince Australians that we should want to see our own films, but it will be easier if we remember that cinema’s tenacious grip on our imaginations came about because of its extraordinary capacity to entertain and astonish us.

He goes on to say: “our storytelling is austere and joyless.” In many ways Louis Nowra’s assessment is correct. We only need to look at the figures from even last year to see how only a

handful of films made any traction with an Australian audiences, and only one, Mao’s Last Dancer, vaguely produced enough box office revenue to even attempt to address the eternal producers conundrum of trying to recoup it’s investment.

So where did that leave my film in the scheme of this? I needed some parameters. I needed to define the spine of the story. What was the appropriate proximity to my subject? What did I want the audience to feel? What was I really wanting to say with this strange story set in Kolkata?

As a filmmaker it’s not about how to tell my audience to feel, to preempt their reaction. But it is my responsibility to be clear about the emotional intentions of the film and hope to God that the audience connects to it in the way I intended.

It’s a very fine line between manipulation and allowing the audience room for personal reaction. This applies doubly so when dealing with complex themes. So as a filmmaker it is not my intention to be for or against adoption, it’s more to raise questions about what it means to take a child away from their culture and whether or not bringing them to another culture is a good or a bad thing.

So even at these very early stages stylistic and tonal ideas began to develop for what the film was going to look like, what it should feel like, sound like. I do not claim to be an expert on the subject for how to resurrect the Australian Film Industry. And I cannot preempt how the film is going to perform at the cinemas when it opens across the nation on 15 July.

On the bright side, it seems that Australians are starting to return to the movies again. Already in 2010, films like the World War 1 drama Beneath Hill 60 and the upbeat Aboriginal musical Bran Nu Dae have demonstrated that Australians are coming back into the cinema. And significantly with the brilliant performance of Animal Kingdom, it is not that Australians are yearning for popcorn crunching entertainment they are happy to embrace dark, insular stories if captured with a careful balance of humanity and catharsis.

So will my film entertain and astonish you? Is it full of humanity and joy? Will it move you, transport you, allow you to suspend your disbelief and take you into a world you have never seen before? Only you can answer this for yourself when the film hits the screens on 15 July.

But I will say this. The film is the best of myself and my team. I know the film is saturated with passion and hope and optimism. And also with love. And not in that kind of soppy, soft core kind of way. Real love. Tough love in all its dimensions.

It is important to me that we see that the characters journey deeply into love to reach a point where they have moved enough away from the stasis of their relationship to a point where they are inspired to offer the best of themselves to each other and the world.

Human emotions can be so complex, so examining what binds us and what can tear us apart are fascinating within the microcosm of a marriage. This form of long-term love also becomes a jumping off point for other themes in the film: motherhood, fertility, gender politics, different expressions of family and journeys to parenthood, spirituality and desire. So there is a great deal of hope and optimism in the film and I really hope the audience to take this away with them.

The film is an amalgam of many formative experiences in my life. Beginning with working in the slums of Kolkata with Mother Teresa’s nuns with my amazing sister Helena and at a turning point shooting a music video on the sweltering banks of the Ganges with my husband-to-be Denson Baker ACS and producer Jamie Hilton as a test run for the real film, The Waiting City in many ways is an expression of many of my loves; of people, music, food, culture and importantly, of the city of Kolkata.

The film glimpses into worlds that we rarely see and looks at poverty and the paradox of beauty and love that can exist within this. It is my hope that the film gives a voice to circumstances and people from less fortunate situations who might not otherwise be considered mainstream entertainment and is fun, effusive and light-hearted in the process.

Most importantly what I’m trying to do with The Waiting City is to present something that is entertaining, that’s uplifting to an audience, that raises questions, hopefully moves people, is emotional, and is ultimately a love story. I do hope you enjoy the film.